Bursitis and Tendonitis

What is Bursitis?

A bursa is a small sac of fluid that helps the muscles slide easily over other muscles and bones. When you hurt or use one of your joints or tendons too much the bursa may swell, causing pain, redness and heat.

What is Tendonitis?

Tendons help join your muscles and bones together. They are tough, rope-like fibers. If you hurt or overuse certain parts of your body, your tendons or the tissue around them may have swelling.

What causes Tendonitis and Bursitis?

• Injuries
• Repeating the same movement over and over
• Activities that you do in sports, your job, or at your home that involve twisting and fast movement.

Both bursitis and tendonitis can happen in several parts of your body. They may also happen together in the same area.

What can I do to prevent Bursitis and Tendonitis?

It is very important to warm-up and stretch before exercising. Slowly increase the activity. Stretch when you are done. If your job involves repeating the same movements, try and take short breaks during your working time.

What can I do at home to help?

Bursitis and tendonitis will usually get better in a few days or weeks, if you stop doing the activity that you think caused it.

To keep it from happening again, you need to do things to stretch and strengthen the muscles around your joint that has been bothering you. You may also need to change the way you do some things.

Here are some suggestions:

• Rest the part of your body that is causing you pain. Do the activity in a different way to prevent strain on your body part that hurts.
• Put ice or cold packs on as soon as you have pain. Leave the cold on for 10 min. of every hour as many times as you can for the next 72 hours. Then keep putting ice on for 15 to 20 min. 3 times a day for as long as it helps your pain.
• Heating pads and hot baths feel good, but ice or cold helps with the swelling and speeds healing.
• Aspirin, ibuprofen, or naproxen may help with the pain and swelling. You should not take these if you are taking blood thinners, Ticlid or if you have any allergies to them. You can check with your doctor or pharmacist about how much you should take. It is not a good idea to take one of these medications, if you keep using your sore joint too much.
• Carefully move your joint through as full a range of motion as you can without any pain several times a day, so your joint will not get too stiff. When your pain starts to get better, you need to stretch and do exercises to help your muscles get stronger.
• You need to warm up your muscles before you do an activity and stretch after. To help stop your joint from hurting and swelling, you can put ice on after you exercise.
• You need to slowly get back to your regular pace. Increase your activity, if you do not have pain.

Return to the Emergency Department IF you have:

• Fever
• Redness
• Cannot use your joint
• Increase in swelling
• Pain gets worse even after following home care and taking pain medication.